Boards are fundraising to help the people of Ukraine via the Red Cross at this horrific time. Please donate and share if you can, you will find the link here. Many thanks.
Vaccine equality and the low rate of vaccination in Africa.
I understand the issue of pharmaceutical companies' intellectual property (IP) rights. So why don't the EU and other major trading powers pay the companies to have the IP rights waived in order to increase the level of vaccination in Africa? After all, it's as much in Europe's interest as it in Africa's to do that.
Why would African countries want to get vaccinated? They have been doing well with Covid compared to here. South Africa went through the Omicron wave with a 30% vaccination rate and similar to us hospitalisations rose only a bit (lots of incidental covid cases in hospitals) ICU numbers remained stable as did deaths.
It's not a matter of IP. You can seize the IP rights but you can't seize their trade secrets, and the IP rights without the trade secrets are useless.
The patents are there to prevent others from competing with you, they are an legal and economical deterrent, but they are in no way a real hurdle in making a vaccine. How they are making the vaccine, the details of their production process, this is what they keep secret, and no waiver will make them disclose it - among other reasons because they might infringe on other's patents themselves.
So all this discussion about patent waivers is just political virtue signaling and blame shifting. It's not the rich countries' fault that Africa is not vaccinated. And without these evil rich countries there will be no vaccine to talk about in the first place. They may want to look at the WHO head if they need someone to blame.
But the director of the African CDC has denied that hesitancy is the reason for low vaccination rates in Africa. The WHO said that nobody is safe until everybody is safe. Why are vaccination rates so low in third-world countries?
The head of the CDC can say it, doesn't change it..
It's quite brazen to say vaccine hesitancy is not a problem in Africa. If he added the caveat that the general population or Govts do not consider Covid a problem and aren't bothered to get Covid specific vaccines, he'd have a point.
There is already tens of millions of vaccines dumped in Africa, more sent back, tens of millions of deliveries cancelled as they can't get people to take it.
